Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ah, what a vast mounting passion fills their spirits

  To get themselves mounted! Such lustful yelps, such a copious

  Downflow of vintage liquor splashing their thighs!

  Off goes Saufeia’s wreath, she challenges the call-girls

  To a contest of bumps and grinds, emerges victorious,

  Herself admires the shimmy of Medullina’s buttocks.17

  Official Roman religion was, not surprisingly, a “cold and prosaic” affair,18 designed to reinforce the social hierarchy rather than to offer the worshipper an experience of communion with the deities. Instead of a specialized priesthood, men of noble rank were appointed to perform the rites; and once the emperor had achieved divinity, starting when Augustus declared himself a god, the connection between religious and secular authority was indissoluble. As for the rites themselves, no one expected them to transform, excite, or in any way appeal to the emotions. Rather, the emphasis was on exact and perfect performance, down to the smallest detail. In animal sacrifice—the most common form of religious observance—the animal had to be physically perfect and, ideally, willing to die, which it demonstrated by obligingly stretching forth its neck for the knife. If the sacrificial rite was marred in any detail, it had to be repeated until the presiding officials got it right. One man acting as priest was forced to quit because his hat fell off while he was sacrificing. 19 The gods, and not the humans present, were the true connoisseurs of the Roman rites, and they were known to be sensitive to the least liturgical lapse.

  But there was a risk inherent in the aristocratic formality of Roman religion. Maybe the tedious official rites did serve to reinforce hierarchy and obedience, but they also left the Roman gods vulnerable to repeated challenges from more emotionally accessible foreign deities. And with an empire embracing so many subjugated peoples—from the tribal Gauls and Britons to the urbane Greeks and Egyptians—there was no way to insulate Rome from the ecstatic rites of alien gods. Historians until recently referred to these ecstatic alternatives somewhat pejoratively, as “oriental religions,” in the usual attempt to locate the sources of the “irrational” somewhere far outside the West, and blamed them in part for the empire’s eventual decadence and decline. Geographically, though, the term oriental applies only to the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, which was introduced to Rome from Anatolia in 204 BCE. The goddess Isis, whose worship was widespread in Rome at the start of the Christian era, hailed from Egypt; and Dionysus/Bacchus was hardly foreign at all.

  On the whole, the Romans were remarkably tolerant toward the gods of their subject peoples, to the point of adopting particularly attractive or efficacious ones. But insofar as these imported deities drew their adherents from marginalized groups within Roman society—women and slaves—the “oriental” cults of Isis, Cybele, and Dionysus carried a hint of political menace. The public worship of Cybele was particularly outrageous, as the historian Mary Beard reports: “With their flowing hair, extravagant jewelry, and long yellow silken robes, they [the devotees of Cybele] offered an image of mad religious frenzy involving not only ecstatic dancing but frenetic self-flagellation and … [in the case of male worshippers] the act of self-castration performed in a divine trance.”20 This was the ultimate challenge to Roman masculine propriety: Not only did Cybele call forth bands of female worshippers on her holy days; she demanded that her male priests, or galli, lop off their testicles in public. Since a man could perform that act of obeisance only once, he was expected, on future occasions of worship, to slash his skin with a knife and proceed through the streets bleeding as he danced in what must have looked, to the status-conscious Romans, like an inexplicable display of self-abasement. Modern historians agree that the worship of Cybele constituted a form of “resistance to dominant elite goals.”21 As Beard puts it:

  On the one hand was the routinized, formal approach of the traditional priesthood, embedded in the political and social hierarchies of the city. On the other hand were the claims of the galli that they enjoyed direct inspiration from the gods—an inspiration that came with frenzy and trance, open to anyone, without consideration of political or social status … By challenging the position of the Roman elite as the sole guardians of access to the gods, the eunuch priests were effectively challenging the wider authority of that elite and the social and cultural norms they have long guaranteed.22

  But, on account of her alleged assistance to the Romans during the Punic Wars, there wasn’t much the authorities could do about Cybele and her followers—except to mock them, as Juvenal did with glee.

  … Now here come the devotees

  of frenzied Bellona, and Cybele, Mother of Gods,

  with a huge eunuch, a face for lesser obscenities

  to revere. Long ago, with a sherd, he lopped off his soft genitals:

  now neither the howling rabble nor all the kettledrums can outshriek

  him.

  A Phrygian mitre [or bonnet, a kind of headgear associated with

  Dionysian worship in Greece] tops his plebeian cheeks.23

  Dionysus, or Bacchus, however, did not enjoy the official protection accorded Cybele. He had not helped Rome militarily or offered any other service to the state. As a result, his devotees could be forcibly suppressed and were in fact eradicated with a viciousness comparable to the repression of Christians a few centuries later. One thing that bothered the authorities was the simple fact that people were gathering without official authorization. To quote the consul who convened the assembly where the Dionysian rites were first denounced: “Your ancestors did not wish that even the citizens should assemble fortuitously, without good reason: they did not wish you to assemble except when the standard was set up on the citadel, or when the army was called out for an election, or when the tribunes had proclaimed a council of the plebs.”24 “Freedom of assembly” was not yet even a distant aspiration; Romans were to express their desire for social contact only at the level of the family or that of the entire mass, and then only when that mass was duly convened by the state. Anything in between was politically suspect. Thus when Pliny the Younger became governor of Bithynia, in Asia Minor, he hesitated to permit the formation of a volunteer fire department. “Will you consider whether you think a company of firemen might be formed, limited to 150 members?” he wrote to the emperor Trajan. “It will not be difficult to keep such small numbers under observation.” Even so, Trajan refused to grant permission, responding that “if people assemble for a common purpose, whatever name we give them and for whatever purpose, they soon turn into a political club.”25

  At the time of the crackdown on Bacchic rites, the worship of Dionysus/Bacchus had been widespread and deeply rooted in Italy for decades.26 According to the Roman historian Livy, the trouble begins with the arrival of a charismatic stranger, just as in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. In the Roman case, the stranger is an itinerant, no-account Greek who “dealt in sacrifices and soothsaying.”27 At first he recruits only women, who observe the rites by day; only when men are included do the rites move to nighttime.

  When the license offered by darkness had been added, no sort of crime, no kind of immorality, was left unattempted. There were more obscenities practised between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim … Men, apparently out of their wits, would utter prophecies with frenzied bodily convulsions: matrons, attired as Bacchantes, with their hair dishevelled and carrying blazing torches, would run down to the Tiber, plunge their torches into the water and bring them out still alight.28

  The allegations of male homosexual activity were alarming enough to the Romans, who shared none of the Greeks’ enthusiasm for same-sex love. But perhaps equally alarming, from a pragmatic Roman point of view, the cult was allegedly “a source of supply of false witnesses, forged documents and wills, and perjured evidence.” 29

  It was the latter kind of chicanery that provided the excuse for forcible suppression. In 186 BCE—just eight years after th
e unsettling introduction of the cult of Cybele—the widow of an elite cavalryman plotted to somehow defraud her grown son Publius Aebutius of his inheritance by having him initiated in the Bacchic rite. According to Livy, Publius agreed to prepare for his initiation and confided as much to his girlfriend, Hispala, a former slave who had become a wealthy prostitute. Having been initiated herself years ago as a slave, she knew the horrible violations that awaited Publius and pleaded with him to ignore his mother’s wishes and forgo the initiation. When his mother insisted, Hispala broke her vow of secrecy to the cult and, despite the “trembling [that] seized every part of her body,” revealed the cult’s activities to the Roman authorities.

  Their response was little short of hysterical; an assembly was called to denounce the “conspiracy” represented by Bacchic forms of worship and order its complete uprooting. Informers were to be rewarded; no one was to leave the city until the investigations were complete. Apparently Rome was crawling with secret Bacchists, since the announcement of the purge plunged the city into “extreme terror,” with thousands attempting to escape before the authorities could get to them. In the ensuing crackdown, about seven thousand men and women were detained, and the majority of them executed—males by the state, women handed over to their families to be killed in private.

  We cannot of course know how much of Livy’s story, and the lurid allegations contained within it, are true. Did the Roman worshippers of Dionysus really engage in homosexual orgies in addition to the standard Greek practice of dancing to ecstasy? And how did they manage to carry on the painstaking work of forging wills, brewing poisons, etcetera, in the midst of their frenzied rites?

  At most, we can deduce from Livy’s story some of the anxieties that afflicted the Roman elite—if not in 186 BCE, then at least near the time of Christ’s birth, when Livy was writing. Clearly, concern over the integrity of Roman manhood was chief among them: A young man, a warrior’s son, was to be cheated of his inheritance by a woman, his mother, and women in general “are the source of this evil thing,” meaning the entire Bacchic “conspiracy.” Homosexual rape was among the crimes attributed to the male cult members, who were, in Livy’s words, “scarcely distinguishable from females.”30 There is no question, though, that whatever went on in the secret rites rendered men unfit for the Romans’ militaristic idea of manhood. “Citizens of Rome,” demands the consul who led the attack on the Bacchic “conspiracy”:

  Do you feel that young men, initiated by this oath of allegiance, should be made soldiers? That arms should be entrusted to men called up from this obscene shrine? These men are steeped in their own debauchery and the debauchery of others; will they take up the sword to the end in defence of the chastity of your wives and your children?31

  Scholars still debate whether the Bacchic cult suppressed in 186 BCE constituted a protest movement of some kind or an actual conspiracy with political intentions. No doubt the Roman male elite had reason to worry about unsupervised ecstatic gatherings: Their wealth had been gained at sword point, their comforts were provided by slaves, their households managed by women who chafed—much more noisily than their sisters in Greece—against the restrictions imposed by a perpetually male political leadership. Two centuries after the repression of Dionysian worship in Italy, in 19 CE, the Roman authorities cracked down on another “oriental” religion featuring ecstatic rites: the cult of Isis. Again there was a scandal involving the use of a cult for nefarious purposes, though this time the victim was a woman, reportedly tricked, by a rejected lover, into having sex with him in the goddess’s temple. In another seeming overreaction, the emperor Tiberius had the priests of Isis crucified and the goddess’s followers exiled to Sardinia along with four thousand other “brigands.”32 There would be no secrets in Rome, and no communal thrills other than those sponsored and staged by the powerful—at their circuses and gladiatorial games, for example.

  So it is tempting to divide the ancient temperament into a realm of Dionysus and a realm of Yahweh—hedonism and egalitarianism versus hierarchy and war. On the one hand, a willingness to seek delight in the here and now; on the other, a determination to prepare for future danger. A feminine, or androgynous, spirit of playfulness versus the cold principle of patriarchal authority. This is in fact how Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, and many since them have understood the emergence of a distinctly Western culture: As the triumph of masculinism and militarism over the anarchic traditions of a simpler agrarian age, of the patriarchal “sky-gods” like Yahweh and Zeus over the great goddess and her consorts. The old deities were accessible to all through ritually induced ecstasy. The new gods spoke only through their priests or prophets, and then in terrifying tones of warning and command.

  But this entire dichotomy breaks down with the arrival of Jesus, whose followers claimed him as the son of Yahweh. Jesus gave the implacable Yahweh a human face, making him more accessible and forgiving. At the same time, though—and less often noted—Jesus was, or was portrayed by his followers as, a continuation of the quintessentially pagan Dionysus.

  3

  Jesus and Dionysus

  In what has been called “one of the most haunting passages in Western literature,” the Greek historian Plutarch tells the story of how passengers on a Greek merchant ship, sometime during the reign of Tiberius (14—37 BCE), heard a loud cry coming from the island of Paxos. The voice instructed the ship’s pilot to call out, when he sailed past Palodes, “The Great God Pan is dead.” As soon as he did so, the passengers heard, floating back to them from across the water, “a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many.”1

  It’s a strange story: one disembodied voice after another issuing from over the water. Early Christian writers seemed only to hear the first voice, which signaled to them the collapse of paganism in the face of a nascent Christianity. Pan, the horned god who overlapped Dionysus as a deity of dance and ecstatic states, had to die to make room for the stately and sober Jesus. Only centuries later did Plutarch’s readers fully attend to the answering voices of lamentation and begin to grasp what was lost with the rise of monotheism. In a world without Dionysus/Pan/Bacchus/Sabazios, nature would be dead, joy would be postponed to an afterlife, and the forests would no longer ring with the sound of pipes and flutes.

  The absolute incompatibility of Jesus and Dionysus—or, more generally, Christianity and the old ecstatic religions—was a tenet of later Christian theology, if not of “Western” thought more generally. But to a Roman living in the first or second century, when Christianity emerged, the new religion would not have seemed so hostile to Dionysus or his half-animal version, Pan. From a Roman perspective, Christianity was at first just another “oriental” religion coming out of the east, and, like others of similar provenance, attractive to women and the poor. It offered direct communion with the deity, with the promise of eternal life, but so did many of the other imported religions that so vexed the Roman authorities. In fact, there is reason to think that early Christianity was itself an ecstatic religion, overlapping the cult of Dionysus.

  To begin with the deities themselves: The general parallels between Jesus and various pagan gods were laid out long ago by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Like the Egyptian god Osiris and Attis, who derived from Asia Minor, Jesus was a “dying god,” or victim god, whose death redounded to the benefit of humankind. Dionysus, too, had endured a kind of martyrdom. His divine persecutor was Hera, the matronly consort of Zeus, whose anger stemmed from the fact that it was Zeus who fathered Dionysus with a mortal woman, Semele. Hera ordered the baby Dionysus torn to shreds, but he was reassembled by his grandmother. Later Hera tracked down the grown Dionysus and afflicted him with the divine madness that caused him to roam the world, spreading viniculture and revelry. In this story, we can discern a theme found in the mythologies of many apparently unrelated cultures: that of the primordial god whose suffering, and often dismemberment, comprise, or are necessary elements of, his gifts to humankind.

  The obvious parallel be
tween the Christ story and that of pagan victim gods was a source of great chagrin to second-century Church fathers. Surely their own precious savior god could not have been copied, or plagiarized, from disreputable pagan cults. So they ingeniously explained the parallel as a result of “diabolical mimicry”: Anticipating the arrival of Jesus Christ many centuries later, the pagans had cleverly designed their gods to resemble him.2 Never mind that this explanation attributed supernatural, almost godlike powers of prophecy to the pagan inventors of Osiris, Attis, and Dionysus.

  Leaving aside Christ as the generic pagan victim god, we find far more intriguing parallels between Jesus the historical figure and the specific pagan god Dionysus. Both were wandering charismatics who attracted devoted followings, or cults; both had a special appeal to women and the poor. Strikingly, both are associated with wine: Dionysus first brought it to humankind; Jesus could make it out of water. Each was purported to be the son of a great father-god-Zeus or the Hebrew god Yahweh—and a mortal mother. Neither was an ascetic—Jesus loved his wine and meat—but both were apparently asexual or at least lacking a regular female consort. Both were healers—Jesus directly, Dionysus through participation in his rites—and both were miracle workers, and possibly, in Jesus’ case, a magician. 3 Each faced persecution by secular authorities, represented by Pentheus, among others, in the case of Dionysus, and Pontius Pilate in the case of Jesus. For what it’s worth, they even had similar symbolic creatures: the fish for Jesus, the dolphin for Dionysus.

  In at least one significant respect, Jesus far more resembles Dionysus than Attis. Attis was a fertility god who died and was reborn again each year along with the earth’s vegetation, while Jesus, like Dionysus, was markedly indifferent to the entire business of reproduction. For example, we know that Jewish women in the Old Testament were devastated by infertility. But although Jesus could cure just about anything, to the point of reviving the dead, he is never said to have “cured” a childless woman—a surprising omission if he were somehow derived from a pagan god of fertility.